FaxAssist: an automatic routing of unconstrained fax to email location
Hassan Alam, Rachmat Hartono, Yanti Sugono, Thuy Tran · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
This paper describes a method for automatically routing unconstrained faxes to mail recipients. Incoming faxes usually have many formats, variation in name representation, and can be either machine or hand printed. Our approach synthesized the use of multiple OCR engines, the geometry based name location, and error correcting name matching. Candidates for a name match are determined by a number of components such as the qualification of the name image, the confidence of the name text, and the confidence of the keyword that appears in front of the name. Multiple name matches are then filtered out based on the weight toward the location of the name in the document and the distance between the keyword and the name, etc. As a result, our project accurately routes faxes to the right destination or sends the fax to an operator if the recipient cannot be recognized with sufficient confidence. An initial prototype fax routing system has been deployed and tested at DARPA. In this paper we discuss our approach, the results of testing at a live site and directions for the future.